The project, championed by a team of multinational communications service providers and led by Vodafone (www.vodafone.com), will demonstrate how shared service catalogues and faster deployment of cloud services can help to facilitate end-to-end, multi-operator closed-loop assurance and wholesale enterprise billing and charging operations.

Other goals will be to orchestrate active monitoring of the service chain across providers to demonstrate how EXFO uses probes to detect service delivery problems and alert operators in real time, and to orchestrate traffic generation to display how EXFO can scale services up and down in closed-loop automation to ensure quality of service.

"Modern cloud-based, software-defined networks will bring a new era of unlimited data and IoT use cases," said Dimitris Symeonidis, Project Lead and Enterprise Architect at Vodafone Group Services. "To successfully deliver complex and innovative services, including augmented reality, we need to enable a diverse partner ecosystem that works together seamlessly. That's where 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) need to come together to deliver enterprise services across partner networks, supported by closed-loop assurance and using industry frameworks and standards."

"The service assurance model and architecture is going through a drastic change as more and more services are being designed and delivered by multiple providers under a single SOC and managed by a single provider," said Claudio Mazzuca, Vice-President, Systems and Analytics at EXFO. "We are thrilled to participate in this cutting-edge POC that gives us a glimpse into the not-so-distant future and demonstrates how EXFO's powerful service assurance solutions can offer providers what they need for a successful digital transformation."

About EXFO

EXFO develops smarter network test, monitoring and analytics solutions for the world's leading communications service providers, network equipment manufacturers and webscale companies. Since 1985, we've worked side by side with our customers in the lab, field, data center, boardroom and beyond to pioneer essential technology and methods for each phase of the network lifecycle. Our portfolio of test orchestration and real-time 3D analytics solutions turns complex into simple and delivers business-critical insights from the network, service and subscriber dimensions. Most importantly, we help our customers flourish in a rapidly transforming industry where "good enough" testing, monitoring and analytics just aren't good enough anymore—they never were for us, anyway. For more information, visit EXFO.com and follow us on the EXFO Blog.